Manchester, England, United Kingdom - October 13, 2028, 11:01 PM BST
The Gay Village had never been this empty.
That was the first wrong thing. Canal Street on a Friday-night-adjacent evening did not do empty — the Village did Neon, did queue-round-the-block, did drunks singing with their arms around strangers. Tonight the streets stretched away in both directions, wet and gleaming and completely deserted, every bar dark behind its glass, and Torin Arman walked down the middle of it all alone, in a coat he didn’t remember choosing, without the slightest idea how long he’d been walking.
That was the second wrong thing. Torin always knew. He knew where he’d started, who he’d started with, what he’d had to drink. He knew the route from any bar in Manchester to any other bar in Manchester the way other people knew their own phone numbers. Now there was just the pavement unrolling ahead of him and the feeling — low in the gut, under everything — that he wasn’t wandering. He was being drawn. Toward something. Toward somewhere. A destination sitting at the end of the walk like a period at the end of a sentence he couldn’t read.
The quiet crawled into his ears and made a home there. His stomach had gone tight, and got tighter, the further he went.
Then, far down the street, he saw the figure.
It was coming toward him — unhurried, in no particular rush, the way someone walks when the appointment is already theirs. There was nothing overtly threatening about it. Nothing hostile about it at all, nothing raised, nothing quick — and that was precisely the problem, because every instinct Torin owned, the social radar he’d navigated rooms with since primary school, lit up all at once and screamed at him to be terrified.
Turn around, he told himself. Just — turn around and go back.
He didn’t turn around.
He told himself again — a proper instruction this time, the full command, leave, now, run — and his feet kept walking forward. He felt them lift and set down, lift and set down, carrying him at a gentle, sightseeing pace directly toward the thing he wanted nothing on earth to do with, and his body had apparently resigned from the union of Torin and gone over to the other side entirely. It was the single most violating feeling of his life. His legs, which had obeyed him through fifteen years of dance floors, had signed with the enemy.
The figure stepped under a streetlight.
And stayed a figure.
The light fell on it the way light does — you could see it landing — and none of it stayed. No face. No eyes. No features of any kind. Where a person was, there was simply shadow: darkness shaped like a man, standing in a pool of brightness, wearing the light like something it had decided not to put on.
Curiosity can kill.
The voice came from inside his own head — soft, masculine, and absolutely not his own. Dark in a way that wasn’t volume. Torin’s whole body dumped adrenaline at once, every field of it, and his heart went off.
Run, he commanded himself — and could not. Panic locked him where he stood, joints bolts, muscles poured concrete, while the figure came on, closer, closer, closer—
They’re coming for you, Torin.
It was beside him. Not in front of him anymore — beside him, at his shoulder, close enough that if it had breath, he’d have felt it on his neck.
They won’t stop till you’re dead.
It hit him.
The world went sideways and down — pavement, impact, the taste of blood appearing in his mouth from apparently nowhere — and then it was on top of him, and it was beating his head against the ground, blow after blow after blow, and the blows were fire and static and the whole street was ringing, and then a hand — he felt fingers, he felt the grip — wrapped around his throat and closed.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He was going to die — he knew it with total, cosmic certainty, the way you know your own name — the pressure in his skull was enormous and his vision was going at the edges, darkness sliding in from all sides like curtains drawn by careful hands, and Torin Arman’s last coherent thought was some version of unfair—
He woke up screaming into his own dark bedroom, sitting bolt upright, gasping like a man pulled out of a canal.
Adrenaline lit him up from the bone out. His hands flew to his throat — whole, unmarked, his — and his eyes went around the room in fast, panicked circles: his curtains, his wardrobe, the lamp he kept meaning to replace, his own ceiling with the water stain shaped like Australia. His bedroom. His actual bedroom, in West Didsbury, in the actual world, where nobody had been beating his skull into the pavement.
A dream.
He pushed the thick, dark hair off his forehead and pulled the sheet across his lap. His narrow shoulders were shaking. All that careful elegance, the slim frame he knew how to dress and carry, reduced to this.
He sat there in the dark, drenched, heart galloping, breathing in controlled little sips like he’d learned from a yoga app he’d downloaded and abandoned, waiting for his body to get the memo. It took a while. It always took a while. His body had always been loyal to the drama a moment longer than the rest of him.
And somewhere in the back of his mind — quiet, patient, already waiting for him, the way a stalker waits outside a gym — the voice said it again, soft and masculine and not his own:
Curiosity can kill.
He was asleep again within five minutes.
This was its own small miracle, and Torin would never know how he’d managed it — he’d have bet anything, examining the adrenaline wreckage of himself in those first dark minutes, that sleep was finished with him until dawn. But exhaustion is its own sedative, and the body, having resigned from the union, apparently also handled the insurance claim. He went down into a deep, unpopulated dark, and the dark held.
He slept well into the afternoon. His parents had a running theory about teenagers — endless vitality, they said, and somehow still asleep all day, the two facts coexisting in defiance of thermodynamics — and Torin had never disputed the science. He was a renewable resource that recharged on its own schedule.
The phone woke him at 1:39 in the afternoon, and he answered it without looking, because only one person called this early in his personal midnight.
“Tell me you’re still coming out tonight,” Alexandre said, by way of hello.
“I’m coming out tonight. I’ve been needing someone who is tall, dark, and handsome to occupy my time,” Torin said into the pillow.
“Of course you do,” he said and Torin could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Well then you’d better wake up, because right now you sound dead.”
“I look worse.” He worked himself upright against the headboard, hair somewhere over on his left, sleep-creased down one cheek, an impression of his pillowcase sitting on his face like a bad tattoo. “City Center. The Village. Yes. Confirmed. What time?”
“Nine? NYNY?”
“NYNY at nine. I’ll be the one everyone’s looking at.”
“You’re always the one everyone’s looking at. It’s why we’re friends.” A pause, and then Alexandre’s voice went deliberately casual, the tone he used when he was leading with his elbow: “What are we taking?”
And Torin grinned at his ceiling, because he’d been sitting on this all week. “Guess who got mushrooms.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.” He let that bloom. “Good ones. Proper ones. A friend of a friend of a friend, and no, I’m not telling you the chain, the chain dies with me.”
“You’re a menace.”
“I’m a host.” Torin was already swinging his legs out of bed, restored, the nightmare somewhere behind him now like a bad support ticket. “Get you absolutely off your face and make you tell me what you really think of my haircut.”
“I think the same thing I always think about your haircut.”
“Tragic and brave? Thank you.”
He rang off a few minutes later on a tide of plans — nine, NYNY, don’t eat too much before, hydrate, text me when you’re leaving — and lay back on the bed with his phone held above his face, and did the thing he did.
The photograph. The ritual one.
He took it without getting up: himself, still in the wreck of the bed, hair ruined, eyes puffy, one shoulder bare, the morning-after light through the curtains doing its soft, forgiving work. He examined it with a professional eye. Messy. Tired. Objectively a state — and objectively still attractive, because Torin knew exactly what his face did in this kind of light, and the light was doing it.
The light picked out the prominent cheekbones and defined jaw of his long, finely drawn face. Very fair skin, a straight nose, full lips; even the sleep-puffed eyes looked large and watchful beneath his straight, dark brows. His thick hair had fallen across his forehead, the shorter sides doing nothing to make the rest look intentional. He’d have called it artful on anyone else.
He posted it with a caption about looking like a total disaster, the absolute worst, do not perceive him in this state — and then he put the phone face-down on his chest and waited, with the patience of a fisherman, for the compliments to come in.
They would. They always did. And he intended to enjoy every single one, at length, possibly out loud.
Showered, dressed, and moisturised, Torin spent an unproductive hour lying on his bed swiping through the apps — three of them, in rotation, the way you turn over cards you’ve already memorised. Beautiful men, beautiful lives, the whole scrolling stock exchange of who’s doing what without him. It should have been engaging.
He was bored within twenty minutes.
This was a dangerous condition. A bored Torin with hours to kill before a night out was a Torin with a mission, and so the mission announced itself, as missions did, fully formed: he needed a new outfit for tonight. Needed one. His wardrobe was — and he conducted the assessment honestly, feeling the shape of the tragedy — fine. Fine was the problem. Tonight demanded more than fine.
He was pulling on his jacket when his thinking turned, with a little internal sigh, to Alexandre. Because shopping for tonight meant, inevitably, thinking about tonight, and thinking about tonight meant thinking about him, and the truth of the thing — a truth Torin held comfortably, the way you hold a family heirloom that might technically have been stolen — was that he and Alexandre had been in competition for years.
Both of them attractive. Both of them gay, and aware of it. Both of them built for attention the way other people were built for sport — and both of them, when they were in the same room, doing the same thing they always did. It wasn’t hostile. It was tradition. A rivalry with rules older than either of them could remember establishing: whoever commanded the room, whoever got the look, whoever got chosen —
And Torin won. Normally. He wasn’t boasting; he was reporting results. Alexandre was gorgeous and knew it, but Torin had an arsenal, and the arsenal was money. When the same boy stood between them at a party, Torin could buy the round nobody expected, produce the table everyone wanted, hand over something expensive with the offhand grace of a man who hadn’t checked the price. Alexandre came from a lovely middle-class family in London and was lovely and middle-class about it, and Torin had learned early that a boy could be won in a single evening by someone who could make the world feel effortless.
He didn’t feel guilty about the arsenal. That was the thing people didn’t understand about him — the weapon existed; refusing to use it would just be theater.
He passed through the kitchen on his way out, where his mother stood at the counter in her weekend uniform of linen and judgment, and she asked, without looking up from the kettle, where he was going.
“Out with Alexandre later — City Center, the Village.” He was already gathering keys, earbuds, the economy of a boy in transit. “I’m going into town first. I need a new outfit. A whole one. It’s an emergency.”
“Torin—”
“How much are you actually going to hold me to, Mum? Fifteen hundred pounds?” He said it with a laugh in it, preemptive, artistic — a boy getting his denial in first.
His mother looked up then, and paused — a brief confusion crossing her face, as if the number had come from somewhere she didn’t have an explanation for — and then she nodded. “Fifteen hundred.”
He blinked. He’d expected — what, negotiation? The other thing, the thing with the lecture? “Fine,” he said, magnanimously, taking the win at the price quoted. “Fifteen hundred. Deal. Love you — byeee—”
And he was out the door and down the drive and into his little Mazda MX-5 — his pride, in gunmetal, top down in October because the cold was a rumour — and pointed toward King Street before the kettle finished.
King Street on a Saturday afternoon was Torin’s natural habitat: expensive windows, expensive people, the whole pedestrianised mile of it humming quietly with the transactional music he’d been raised on. He worked it with method. Three pairs of trousers — one forgiving, one unforgiving, one for afterwards — two shirts that were respectable but not the one. Every piece deducted, mentally, from the fifteen hundred, the calculation in his head running cleanly, because whatever else Torin Arman squandered, he never squandered a calculation.
Then he found it.
Back corner of a shop he liked, on a rail the shop had plainly hidden from its main traffic: a shirt that stopped him mid-stride. Black — of course — but a black with something under it, a weave that caught light like water, a collar that stood exactly the way collars never stood on hangers. He held it up and saw, with total clarity, the entire evening: the shirt under the lights of NYNY, the shirt turning heads on Canal Street, the shirt winning.
The rest of the haul — trousers, shirts, the lot — was going to come in around fourteen hundred. This shirt would put him over. He knew it without adding; the price architecture of King Street was in his bones. He ran the sums again and got the same answer, and dismissed the sum entirely. If his parents raised it, he would apologise later, beautifully, with something approximating sincerity. Apology was a service his family’s economy offered in abundance. Tonight he wanted the outfit, and tonight was where he lived.
There was no price tag on it.
He carried it to the front like evidence, holding it against his chest, already checking the dark reflection in the shop window beside the till — how the black sat against his skin, what it would do for the cheekbones, what it would do for everything — and asked the cashier how much it was, in the tone of someone asking about weather. The decision was made. The question was a courtesy.
The cashier — mid-forties, kind face, name badge — turned the shirt over, looked at the inside collar, looked at the sleeve seam, and came up with nothing. “There’s no price on it,” she said, apologetic. “Let me check in the back. One moment.”
“Take your time.” He did not mean it, and she knew, and smiled anyway, and disappeared through the stockroom curtain.
Torin returned to his reflection. Held the shirt flat against himself at the shoulder, turned a degree, turned back. The window mannequin’s world made a decent audience. He imagined the shirt arriving at NYNY, imagined Alexandre’s face doing the small, involuntary thing it did — that was the competition, right there, the involuntary thing, the one you couldn’t fake and couldn’t buy — and he was still thinking about Alexandre’s face when the cashier came back out.
“That one’s a hundred and seventy-eight,” she said.
“A hundred and forty-eight,” said Torin.
It was out of his mouth before anything in him had approved it — level, easy, certain, the voice of a man correcting a small, unremarkable error. And then the strangeness of it caught up with him, because Torin had not seen a label. Had not checked a listing. Had not heard a number from anyone, anywhere, in relation to this shirt, in his life.
He knew it was a hundred and forty-eight pounds the way he knew his own birthday. And underneath the knowing, arriving a half-second late but arriving unmistakably: the certainty that she knew it too. That the hundred and seventy-eight had not been a mistake.
The cashier paused. She looked at him — a different look than the one she’d left with — and asked, carefully, “Where did you get that price?”
And Torin — who could talk his way into, out of, and around anything, who had an answer for teachers, bouncers, his mother, and the police — had nothing. He stood there holding the shirt against his chest in a shop on King Street with an unexplained number sitting in his mouth and no account of how it had gotten there.
So he did what men do when they’re caught holding a fact they can’t source: he doubled down. “It’s not a hundred and seventy-eight,” he said, and heard his own voice edge from certainty into accusation — that’s not the price — as though the till were the problem, as though she were the problem, and watched her face close a degree.
The cashier’s back straightened. Whatever she’d been about to say, she filed it, and her voice went cool and proper. “It’s a hundred and seventy-eight pounds.”
And Torin heard himself. Properly heard it: a teenager in an expensive jacket, arguing over thirty pounds, in the particular way that only ever meant rich, with nothing — nothing — to back the number. He watched the exchange collapse in her expression, and the shirt suddenly cost more than its price.
He wanted it. That was the bottom line, under all of it — he wanted the shirt, wanted it for tonight, wanted it now, and the fastest way out of this hole was to stop digging and pay. “I’m sorry,” he said, and made it land — the apology he was actually good at, the one with the shoulders and the eyes. “You’re right. I don’t know where I got that. It’s my mistake.” He handed over his card for a hundred and seventy-eight pounds, and hated thirty of them with a purity he reserved for genuine enemies.
The transaction went through. The bag came over the counter. And as he turned for the door, he heard her — quiet, half under her breath, pitched for her coworker and not for him:
“How did he know?”
Torin glanced back. The cashier met his eyes for a split second and broke off, suddenly fascinated by the till. Her coworker gave her a small, uncertain shrug — the shrug of someone with no explanation to offer and no wish to discuss it.
He walked out with the shirt in its bag and the question walking beside him like a stray that had chosen him. A hundred and forty-eight. He hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t heard it. He hadn’t guessed it — guessing has a texture, and this had none; this had been knowledge, arriving whole, wearing certainty like a fitted jacket.
He did not have a word for what had just happened. He certainly didn’t have the word for what it might mean. He had a shirt, and thirty pounds of resentment, and an uncomfortable, itching certainty that he had just known something he had no ordinary way of knowing — and that somewhere back in that shop, someone knew he’d known.
Torin took a rideshare into the Village and arrived outside New York New York at 9:03 precisely, on the grounds that he expected to drink, and to take mushrooms, and that the man who intended to be profoundly impaired later had a responsibility not to be behind the wheel of a gunmetal MX-5 while getting there. His mother would have fainted at the notion of Torin exercising foresight. He made a mental note never to tell her.
Alexandre was already there — of course he was, Alexandre’s superpower was arriving with everyone believing they were early — leaning against the wall outside the club in a coat Torin instantly wanted and would never admit wanting.
And beside him was a stranger.
Not a stranger to Alexandre — the proximity made that clear, the set of their shoulders toward each other, the finished quality of the pairing. A stranger to Torin, which was a different thing entirely, and Torin’s attention — professionally distributed, socially omnidirectional — came about and focused.
“Torin!” Alexandre’s face did its genuine-warmth thing; whatever their rivalry was, the greeting never failed. “This is Zach. My boyfriend. Zach — Torin, the one I’ve told you about.”
Boyfriend.
The word landed, and Torin, who missed nothing, missed nothing: boyfriend. Alexandre had a boyfriend, and had brought him to Manchester, and had — Torin’s mind, keeping score in the background — not mentioned him on the phone earlier that afternoon.
“Zach lives in London,” Alexandre added — as if that were the relevant part, as if the word boyfriend hadn’t already detonated strategically in Torin’s chest.
Torin looked at Zach, and Zach looked back, and Torin’s assessment completed itself in roughly a second and a half, because he’d been doing this since he was fourteen and had never once been slow on intake: masculine. Built — properly built, the kind the gym notices. Confident in the shoulders and the stance, and just slightly, deliciously cocky about it — the small tilt of the chin, the handshake that came in a half-beat firm. Dark hair, dark eyes, a jaw that photographed from above.
Zach was, with almost offensive precision, Torin’s exact type. Tall, dark, handsome — the phrase from his own joke on the phone this afternoon surfaced and waved at him. Torin had, over the years, developed a theory that the universe had a sense of humour, and here was another exhibit.
“Torin,” he said, and put his hand out, and took Zach’s.
“Good to meet you.” Zach’s voice was low, unhurried. “He’s talked about you.”
“Only the flattering parts, I hope.”
“He didn’t say you’d be— " Zach’s eyes did a quick pass, unembarrassed, “—quite this much of a look.”
And Torin held his gaze a moment longer than the exchange required. A moment longer than politeness. He held it because holding it was a move, and because — he noted it with the small cold clarity that sat underneath the charm, the part of him that kept score — there was something there. Some hum on the wire between them. Chemistry, if he had to call it that: a live current, running the wrong way down a wire it had no business on. He felt it. He was fairly sure Zach felt it. He was entirely sure Zach shouldn’t.
Well, thought the part of Torin that never lost a night out. Here we are.
The three of them went in together, and Torin bought the first round without asking — three drinks, ordered with the authority of a regular, paid before anyone could reach for a wallet — and stood at the bar in the noise and the lights and thought, with a sensation that was equal parts delight and appetite and something less flattering that he didn’t look at directly:
It’s started, then.
Because that’s what tonight was, now. Zach had changed the terms, and the terms had changed the game, and Torin Arman had never in his life declined a game he intended to win.
He raised his glass to both of them — to his friend, to his friend’s boyfriend, to the current state of play — and prepared to fight for every ounce of Zach’s attention in the room.
The mushrooms went around a little after quarter past nine.
Torin produced them with the flourish the occasion deserved — a small operatic production of baggies and ceremony, Dosage Advisor to his people — and they took them together at the bar, washed down, laughed at, three little chemistries beginning their slow work. Torin knew these molecules the way other people knew their hometown: the onset curve, the half-hour of doubt, the brightening. He had a reputation to maintain tonight, and the universe, whatever it was doing with him lately, appeared to be cooperating.
The night warmed. The club got loud and gold and moving. And Torin flirted.
He didn’t lack subtlety — he had oceans of it, when he chose — but tonight he chose to spend it and watch Zach take the deliveries: the compliments that arrived as teasing, the touch at the shoulder that stayed a half-second past friendly, the running commentary that was really one long sentence with a question buried in the middle. And Zach — Torin charted it, contact by contact — received. Laughed at the right beats. Looked a beat too long. Leaned in when the room’s noise demanded, and then leaned when it didn’t. Torin trusted his read on people as completely as he trusted anything, and his read tonight said: receptive. However loyally the word boyfriend had been deployed at the door, the man underneath it was not unhappy about the attention.
And Alexandre — Torin knew this too, from years of it — Alexandre was timid. Gentle in the pursuit and slow to make a move, a boy who could want something for a year and leave it wanted. The competition had rules, and one of the rules was: hesitation loses.
So Torin did the thing Alexandre wouldn’t.
“Dance with me,” he said to Zach — loud, bright, framed as a demand, announced like it was nothing.
And Zach looked at Alexandre — a glance, a half-second, checking — and then set his drink down, and took Torin to the floor.
The floor was where Torin lived. He’d been dancing since before he could drive, and he moved the way he did everything: with total commitment and no visible fear of judgment. The music was enormous and the lights went through the dark in colors that — the mushrooms were properly on now, arriving like sunrise in fast-forward — the colors meant things, the bass was a texture you could lean on, and Zach was close, closer, dancing the way he evidently did everything, confident and just cocky enough, and the current on the wire between them was no longer subtle.
Torin turned it up.
A hand at the small of Zach’s back. The step closer that isn’t a step anymore. And then, at the edge of the chorus, with his mouth near Zach’s ear so the words would land where only Zach could hear them, Torin made the pass — direct, unhidden, all his cards on the table at once, because that was who he was and how he’d always played:
“Come find me later,” it said, more or less, “and I’ll show you what he doesn’t.”
And for a moment — one suspended, glittering, fatal moment — Zach responded.
Torin felt it happen, felt the current complete itself. Zach’s face came down toward his through the strobing dark — close, close, the entire club funnelling down to the space between two mouths — and Torin’s eyes were closing, and the night, at that instant, was his, won, decided—
Zach stopped.
Torin felt the withdrawal the way you feel a floor open. Zach came back up out of the almost-kiss as if surfacing from underwater, put half a step of air between them, and — Torin watched it happen with the mushrooms turning the whole moment tragic and enormous — shook his head, once.
“I’m sorry,” Zach said — loud enough to carry, not loud enough to hide. “I’m sorry. This is wrong. That’s — no. This is wrong.” And he was backing off the floor, away from Torin, both hands raised a little like a man declining a gift he wanted, and then he turned and walked back across the club toward Alexandre.
Torin stood in the lights and the noise and the sudden screaming emptiness where a victory had been, and did what he always did when a thing fell through: he started building the argument. He felt it. He was going to. I didn’t imagine— His feet followed Zach off the floor before the defense was even finished, because the defense was for later; right now the situation was still salvageable, there was always another way, there was always—
He got halfway there. Close enough to see them come together at the edge of the bar — Zach leaning to Alexandre’s ear, Alexandre’s face going through changes — close enough to see Alexandre look over, at him, once, twice, three times, tracking him the whole time Zach talked. Telling him. Of course he was telling him. The whole night was being footnoted into a report in real time.
Torin kept walking anyway, assembling an opening line — let me explain, it wasn’t — and got within ten feet before Alexandre turned fully around and raised one hand. Flat out. A stop sign with a face on it.
Torin stopped. He was, by then, in no state to argue the point — the mushrooms were at full tide, the alcohol was underneath them, and the club’s noise and light had taken on a physical weight, pressing on him from all sides like deep water. And something else came through the water: Alexandre’s anger. It reached Torin — physically reached him, or seemed to, a heat and a pressure off his friend’s body, betrayal with a temperature — and it stopped him harder than the hand had.
“Years, Torin.” Alexandre’s voice came out low and shaking, and every word had been waiting a long time. “Years I’ve known exactly what you are. Desperate. Needy. Entitled. The most spoiled person I have ever met in my life — and I have loved you, you absolute idiot, which is the only reason none of it ever mattered.”
“Alexandre—”
“No. You don’t get to talk.” The hand was still up; the voice went up with it. “I have been your friend since we were children. Your confidant. I have never — not once, not ever — treated you like an opponent. And you—” he stopped, laughed, a horrible small laugh with no humour anywhere in it, “—you move on my boyfriend. In front of me. In our club. You couldn’t even wait until you got him alone.”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“This time you went too far.” Alexandre’s voice dropped, which was worse than the shouting; the whole club’s noise seemed to lean in. “You know what you can do? Take the entitlement, and everything that comes with it, and shove it up your arse. I’m done, Torin. I don’t need you in my life. Find someone else to be the audience.”
Torin knew — the way he’d known the price of the shirt, whole and unearned — that Alexandre meant it.
The word for what happened to him then was devastation, and it was not dramatic; it was structural. Something load-bearing went. Torin stood in the middle of New York New York with the music hitting him in the chest and the lights crawling and his one non-negotiable person — the person everything had secretly been for — saying done, and meaning it.
His stomach turned over. Nausea arrived from three directions at once — mushrooms, vodka, and something the chemists hadn’t named — and the club’s noise, which had been the best thing in the world an hour ago, was now a physical assault, every beat a blow, every voice too close, the lights going through his skull in colors that hurt—
He was going to be sick. Or cry. Or both, and neither was happening here.
Petty, he thought, with the terrible lucidity the mushrooms dispensed like a fine, vicious wine. Cruel. That’s what that was. That’s what I am, apparently. And underneath the thought, the one that actually had teeth: there had been no competition. Alexandre had never entered one. Torin had spent years scoring a match the other player didn’t know was being played — and there was no opponent to lose to.
He had defeated himself. Alone, in front of everyone, in his new shirt.
Torin walked out.
The Village outside was cool and loud with street noise, and he walked — fast, coatless in feeling, shirt glorious and unbearable — into the crowd, hoping the night air might settle his stomach and his soul in whatever order they arrived.
A man stepped into his path, already smiling, opening his mouth to speak—
“I’m not interested,” Torin said, and walked on.
And knew, walking away, exactly what the man had been about to ask him. Not guessed — knew, the way he’d known the price, whole and unearned, before a word was said. Behind him, the stranger stood looking baffled at the space where the conversation had failed to happen.
He walked for fifteen minutes, by his best estimate, which by his own admission was no estimate at all.
The nausea was retreating slowly. The mushrooms had plateaued into something steadier and stranger — the world slightly too vivid, meaning leaking out of ordinary objects — and Alexandre’s words kept arriving in waves, each one fresh, each one years old at the same time. Torin wandered with them, too emotionally flattened to care about direction, and the character of the streets changed around him by degrees: less neon, fewer crowds, shopfronts he couldn’t name, a quality of the pavement he didn’t recognise. His loafers — beautiful, brutal — had begun to hurt, and the pain finally made him quantify things: he had been walking a long time. He had, he realized, no idea how long.
The thought landed.
No idea how long. No idea how he got here.
The chill came up his arms in the cool air — because he knew this feeling, had already lived it once tonight, in a dream he’d been successfully not thinking about for nearly twenty-four hours: the empty streets, the wrongness, the walking without origin or destination. He stood very still on the pavement while his pulse remembered how to panic.
It’s a coincidence, he told himself. It’s a city. Cities have streets.
He decided, with the decisiveness of a man negotiating with the universe, to go home. He pulled out his phone: 10:39 PM. Barely eleven, barely early, by the standards of his people — the night had hours left in it and he’d been through a war. He opened the rideshare app and watched the little car icons mill around the map.
He was thumbing toward confirm when he noticed the man coming toward him.
A couple hundred feet away, still. Walking with a purpose — a long, even, unhurried stride, coming up the pavement straight through the pools of streetlight. And Torin’s attention, ragged as it was, snagged on him the way a sleeve snags: because the man was beautiful. Tall. Dark. Handsome in a way that made the phrase feel new — and built, and carried, and masculine, everything about him tuned to a frequency Torin’s whole life had been organized around.
He was probably headed for the Village, Torin thought. The clothes said effort; the grooming said audience. The clothes and the grooming and the face said, if Torin was honest, queer as a Monday, and headed into town for the same night Torin had just been ejected from.
Approach him, said the part of him that was still shopping. Someone tall, dark, and handsome to take you home — you said it yourself, this afternoon, on the phone, laughing— And Torin felt the pull of it, genuinely: distraction, in its most flattering available form. A beautiful stranger, a clean slate, a night rescued from the wreckage of the last one. Alexandre’s voice could be drowned. That was practically the use of men like this one.
But first — the habit of a lifetime, running before he’d invited it — Torin studied him. Read him. Because Torin had always been able to do this, had never thought of it as doing anything: the lifelong, effortless intake of other people. He could walk into a room and feel the argument in the corner, the breakup in the booth, the man scanning for an exit, the man scanning for a target. Faces and posture and the hundred tiny broadcasts of the body — and sometimes, underneath the ordinary evidence, brief, uninvited flashes of the inside of people.
Not words. More like weather. A pressure of what someone was actually feeling, arriving in him with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence. He’d had it since he was small. He’d assumed, in the casual way he assumed most of his advantages, that everyone had it and most people were just quiet about it.
The stranger was a hundred feet away. Seventy. Fifty.
Torin looked at him — properly looked, focused, the way you focus when a puzzle is being unfair — and reached for the read.
And got nothing.
Nothing. Not cold, not guarded, not private. Nothing. No mood. No intention. No flicker of the inner weather. No ordinary broadcast of face and body either — and Torin realized, with a growing, ringing hollowness, that he had never in his life stood in front of another human being and felt this: the total, sourceless absence of another person. It was like reaching for a handrail in the dark and finding the wall gone.
The man passed him — three feet away, close enough to touch, close enough to smell — and made eye contact for exactly one step. Dark eyes. Nothing behind them that Torin could find. Nothing at all — no anger, no curiosity, no nothing, looking at him the way a door looks at a room.
Torin turned and looked after him, because his body made him. Half of him was disturbed, ringing alarm after alarm about the emptiness where a person should have been. The other half — incorrigible, irrepressible, dressed and ready for the evening — was still running attraction calculations and composing a signal.
The stranger stopped mid-stride.
Stopped — one foot still in the air for a moment, the whole mechanical rhythm of a walk suspending itself — and slowly, slowly, began to turn back around.
Curiosity can kill.
The voice arrived from the back of his mind — faint, masculine, the nightmare’s voice, the one that had strangled him on Canal Street — and Torin’s whole body went to ice. The stranger completed his turn and came back the way he’d come, walking directly toward Torin, into the streetlights, with his face bare and open and completely, impossibly empty.
Torin backed up. One step. Two. The stranger’s pace increased — smoothly, without hurry graduating into hurry — the dark eyes fixed on him with total, unblinking attention, and around the eyes and the mouth there was no expression at all. No anger. No aggression. No fear. Not even the focused blank of intent. Just a face, wearing itself, aimed at him.
And the dream came back to Torin all at once, whole and physical — the shadow that had no face, the pavement, the blows, the hand at his throat, they won’t stop till you’re dead — and this time the figure had a face, a beautiful one, and it was the same. It was the same, the wrongness of it was the same, the drawn-toward-it-without-consent feeling was the same, and Torin’s body knew what was coming for it the way the body always knows.
He needed to run. He needed to run now.
He couldn’t. The paralysis came down on him like the dream’s — legs bolted, breath short, the pavement holding him by the ankles — and the stranger came on, patient as a tide, and Torin stood there in the street he didn’t know with his phone still open in his hand showing a little map of little cars, frozen—
Run.
One word. A single command inside his head, stripped by panic of anything he could identify — not shouted, not panicked; certain — and it went through Torin like a hand through smoke.
He ran.
He broke. The paralysis shattered the way it hadn’t in the dream, and Torin turned on his heel and ran — proper running, arms and all, loafers hammering the pavement, his whole life’s cardio arriving all at once to be cashed in — and the voice went through his head again, closer now, louder, an instruction laid over the world like a caption: Don’t stop. Don’t stop, or it will kill you.
He didn’t stop. He heard, behind him — after forty feet, after fifty — the sound he’d been refusing to listen for: footsteps. Not stumbling, not drunken, not human-paced. Fast. He glanced back once, over his shoulder, for the half-second the price of knowing allowed—
The man was chasing him. Gaining. And as Torin watched, the stranger’s arm came up and outstretched, reaching for him across the closing gap, fingers spread, and the man’s face was still empty — no rage, no exertion, nothing — and he wasn’t winded. That was the detail that punched through the terror and lodged like a splinter: The empty thing pursuing him could do this all night, the not-tiredness said. Torin could not.
Torin ran three blocks on legs that were filing complaints, past pubs and shuttered fronts and dark little streets he couldn’t have named under torture, and finally, finally risked the look again—
The man was there. Close. Hand out.
Run through traffic, said the voice.
Torin saw it — the road ahead, the traffic, the actual river of headlights coming down the carriageway, oncoming, continuous, a wall of moving metal — and some surviving committee in his head filed its objection: you’ll be hit. You’ll be killed. That’s certain death wearing the costume of an exit—
“Do it!” The voice filled his skull, louder than it had ever been, the force of it actually painful, a shout inside the bone. “Right now!”
Torin did not decide. There was no time for deciding, and decisions had never been his fastest organ. He turned and darted into the oncoming traffic.
The van missed him by a fraction of an inch.
He felt it — the shove of displaced air, the whole side of his body smarting with the pressure of a miss — and the instant he cleared it, still at a dead run, he heard the impact behind him.
The sound was wrong for a shout, wrong for a scream, wrong for brakes. A heavy, car-sounding thud and a crumple, the sound a body makes when a van at speed stops treating it as an obstacle to avoid.
Torin looked back once, without stopping — without daring to stop — and saw him.
The stranger lay in the road behind the van. On his back. The neck broken — visibly broken, the head resting at an angle heads do not go, a right angle to the spine, the streetlights falling evenly on a face that still held no expression at all.
Torin kept moving. He ran until his legs gave out on running and settled for a fast, staggering walk, and then a walk, and then — three-quarters of a block later — a walk, in the direction of light and people, with his heart hammering and the word dead ringing in him like a struck pipe.
Keep walking, said the voice — quieter now, gentler, an instruction you’d give someone you were walking home. Keep walking.
He walked two blocks on autopilot, past the lit windows of a kebab shop, past a taxi rank, the city around him doing its ordinary Saturday business with no idea what had just happened on the pavement behind it.
On the third block, the voice came back one more time — and this time it was a whisper, almost too quiet to catch, and it said:
You’re safe.
And Torin stopped in the middle of the pavement — because he finally heard her.
The voice was a woman’s. Distinctly, unmistakably a woman’s — it had been there under every instruction like a face under a hood, and only now, with safe, did it turn into the light. And she had an accent — she’d had one all along — an accent he couldn’t place at all. Not local. Not English, not American, not anything from the shelves of accents he’d collected off a lifetime of telly and travel. It came from somewhere he’d never been, and it was warm, and it was tired in the way a person is tired after carrying something heavy for a long way.
It was not the man’s voice. It had never been the man’s voice — the voice that had whispered curiosity can kill while something beat his head against the pavement in a dream, and the voice that had ordered him into traffic — were they the same? Had they ever been the same? There had been one voice in the dream, male, and there had been — how many tonight? — and Torin stood on a pavement in an unknown part of Manchester with his chest heaving, listening to the inside of his own head, and the thought arrived, and it was the worst one yet:
Two voices. Both inside my head. Since last night.
How long has it been since the inside of my head was just mine?
The first open establishment turned out to be a local bar — not a club, a bar, low-lit and nearly empty, the kind of place with one television and a landlady. Torin went in on legs that didn’t entirely belong to him, sat at the bar itself — public, lit, populated, safe — and ordered a vodka tonic from a barman who took one look at him and poured it without commentary.
The drink helped, or the sitting did. He got his breathing down to merely audible. In the window’s dark reflection he could see the state of him: the new shirt, glorious and ruined; hair everywhere; the face of a boy who’d been in an accident he couldn’t report. He ordered his rideshare from the bar — home, now, home, with a pickup from a lit doorway in front of witnesses, because he was not walking one more meter alone tonight and he was not, under any accounting, sitting in the dark by himself.
He watched the little car icon approach through the streets, and he did not look at the inside of his own head, and the vodka sat in him without doing anything at all — which was its own quiet wrongness, because Torin knew exactly how many units he’d had, and knew what they should have been doing, and they weren’t doing it. He felt sober. He felt — there was no other word for it, and it made no sense — clearer than he’d felt all night. Sharper. The drink might as well have been water. He noted it the way he’d noted the shirt’s price: another fact that didn’t add up, filed next to all the others.
The pursuit. The van. The angle of that poor bastard’s neck on the tarmac. A voice in the dream that warned him, and a voice on the street that commanded him — one of which had accompanied the thing that nearly killed him, and one of which had, with military precision, saved his life. Both of them inside his skull. Both of them only inside his skull.
The rideshare came. He got in, gave his postcode, and watched Manchester slide by the window, and did not say one word about any of it.
Torin let himself into the dark house — the house’s silence everywhere, the hallway smelling of the day’s absence — and did not turn on the big lights.
He stood in the kitchen in the dark for a while, not doing anything, and then gave up on the pretence of composure and sat down with his phone, because there was one thing he had to do before he was allowed to sleep, and it wasn’t a drink, and it wasn’t bed.
He opened the social apps and posted.
He kept it careful — he’d learned, from years of audience management, exactly how much weirdness a post could carry before it stopped being \* Torin being Torin\* and started being a concern. He described the walk home. The man who’d turned around and followed him. The chase — he would not stop, I’ve never seen anyone move like it. The traffic, the van, the impact he’d heard behind him. And the part he made himself type, because leaving it out would have been the saner edit and he’d never once in his life chosen the saner edit: I keep hearing things. Voices. Before it happened, I heard someone tell me to run through traffic. And I did, and it saved my life. Has ANYONE experienced anything like this?? Please. I’m not joking. — T.
Specific enough that anyone who had experienced something similar could find it. Restrained enough that it did not sound like a manifesto — though even he could hear the manifesto knocking underneath it.
He set the phone down. Picked it back up. Scrolled.
And scrolled directly into the story.
It was one of those aggregator accounts, the kind that surface at 3 AM with footage of floods and fights: “Man rises from the dead in Suva, Fiji — October 14, 10:03 AM local time.” Grainy footage, an ambulance bay, a covered gurney — and then movement where no movement should be, the cover displaced, a figure sitting up with the wrong mechanics, the filming devolving into screaming and running. The comments were a wall of fake, CGI, hoax for clicks, why is this even viral, nothing even happened, it’s not like it’s climate news — hundreds of them, the internet’s immune system doing its routine, ordinary work.
Torin wasn’t reading the comments. Torin was doing the time-zone conversion.
October 14. 10:03 AM. Fiji time.
He’d been on this planet eighteen years; he’d never once needed Fiji’s time zone, but the app would tell him — Fiji was eleven hours ahead. Eleven hours back from 10:03 in the morning put it at —
11:03 PM. October 13th. His time. His night. Two minutes after he’d sat up screaming in this exact bed, with a shadow’s hand around his throat, while a voice that wasn’t his own whispered in his skull: they’re coming for you, Torin. They won’t stop till you’re dead.
A man got up off a mortuary slab in Fiji, Torin thought, with the goosebumps arriving across his whole body, at the moment I woke up from the dream about the thing that shouldn’t be alive.
He sat in his dark kitchen and the shiver went down his spine and kept going, past the end of the spine, into some place shivers don’t usually reach, and he looked at the phone, and at the hollow laughter of the comments, and at the big dark house around him.
“What is happening?” he asked out loud.
Nothing answered him. He waited, actually waited, one full ridiculous minute, listening to the inside of his own head like a man listening to a phone line after the dial tone has died.
Nothing came.
He went up to bed eventually — climbed in clothed at first, then couldn’t stand the clothes, then stripped and lay in the dark with the duvet to his chin. Upset, scared, and alone. He lay there listening — to the house, to the street, to himself — for a very long time.
He slept. Eventually. With the light on.
Torin woke the next morning with his face aching from the inside — that swollen, post-cry, post-adrenaline hangover of the eyes — and lay in the wreck of the bed remembering yesterday in instalments, each one worse than the last, and reached for his phone the way he reached for it every morning, before he remembered what he’d posted.
He had notifications.
Dozens of them. More than a Saturday-afternoon thirst trap had ever pulled — the strange-post had traveled, tagged and quoted and screenshotted, and Torin sat up against the headboard with his heart going, because attention was attention, and some starving part of him had missed even this — and then he opened the thread and found Alexandre’s name at the top of it.
Alexandre — his Alexandre, his oldest friend, his done friend — had responded publicly.
Not kindly.
“For everyone concerned about ‘Torin’s terrifying encounter’ — I was there last night. Well, I was there before he ran off into the night to be menaced by his own reflection. What Torin is not telling you is that he spent the evening drinking vodka and taking mushrooms — his own supply, naturally — before this ‘attack’ happened.”
Torin read it twice. The words held still the way words do, refusing to rearrange themselves into anything kinder.
“What he also isn’t telling you is that this is what he DOES. Torin has needed to be the main character since we were eleven. There’s always a drama, always a story where all eyes land on him. This week it’s voices in his head and a demon with a fitness routine. Last month it was something else. There’s always something else.”
And then the last one, the knife put in with the wrist turned, the way Alexandre could do — the way that only someone who’d loved you that long could do:
“He’s fine, everyone. He’s just dramatic, and he’s just high, and he’s just the center of his own universe, as usual. — A.”
Torin sat there in the morning light with the phone in his hands.
The accusations stung, and he examined the sting with the unflinching eye of a boy who knew his own inventory, and found the worst part: the accusations were accurate. He had been drinking. He had taken mushrooms — his own supply, that part was even funny, in the way of things that aren’t. He did need attention, constantly, the way other people needed iron; he’d built his whole metabolism on it and had never once pretended otherwise. Every word of Alexandre’s post was true — and it was also, Torin knew, holding the phone very still, the truth the way a disguise is the truth.
It fit over what happened last night. It did not explain the angle of a stranger’s neck. It did not explain the price of a shirt, or a voice with an accent from nowhere, or a mortuary in Fiji. But truth didn’t have to explain. It only had to stick.
And it was sticking. He watched it stick. The comments on his post were turning — he could see the current reverse in real time, commenter by commenter — from oh my god are you okay to wait, wasn’t he the guy from last night’s drama to mushrooms, obviously, check his friend’s post to the small laughter of strangers enjoying someone’s downfall. Alexandre’s version was simpler than Torin’s. Alexandre’s version had a villain with a track record, and the track record was real, and the audience took it, because audiences always took the simpler story about a boy they didn’t know.
Humiliation came up in him — not the hot kind he could laugh off, the cold kind. The kind that lives in the stomach. He read the thread down to the bottom, and then back up, and there was no version of this where staying visible helped. Every additional comment was another copy of his worst night, public, circulating, Alexandre-approved.
The friendship’s corpse was already in the ground; he wasn’t going to let it take his whole reputation with it.
Torin deleted the post.
He did it deliberately, taking the time to feel the finality of each step — the menu, the confirmation, the little dialogue box asking if he was sure. Yes, he told the box. He watched the thread vanish from his profile, the notifications collapse around its absence, the strange night unhook itself from his public self and drop away into the internet’s forgettable everywhere.
And that, as far as Torin Arman was concerned — lying back against the headboard with the phone face-down on his chest, the humiliation settling over him in the silent house, Alexandre gone, last night unposted, unrecoverable, gone —
— was the end of it.